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Flappy Herbie Saga: Trolls of the Forest

Flappy Bird did it. The most simple game ever build at the top of every AppStore. How frustrating can that be to big game development companies that put hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing and marketing their games? It is so funny to follow this industry. You can never predict the future.

I was feeling so psyched about it! I needed to mock it, understand it, troll it, test it, everything at the same time. So my creative juices started boiling again, and I decided that I had to make a game that will express all that. Everything in it should be trolling some part of the situation. The game itself, the gamers, the appstores, the clone haters. So starting from the game name you can begin to understand what is going on. “Flappy Herbie Saga: Trolls of the Forest”. I used to name my games with short names. Not anymore. The game is also SO hard that it provides Zen relaxation services to the gamer for free. Even though I was tempted to make it a paid service at some point just to meta-troll it. When you feel frustrated by the game you can read beatiful Zen calming quotes, while listening to nice relaxing music. I am not going to dive into all satire points in the game as I will ruin it, but you will get the point for sure.

I had to make it in 1-2 days. So I took the assets from FlyCraft and made the new game around Herbie trying to fly through the forest. Using his own wings at this time. It turns out SylphisMobile can be good for platformers too. Also implemented in-apps to buy gems that let you resurect if you die and you really think it was unfair 😛

Releasing on BlackBerry World

I released the game in BlackBerry World only to realise first hand the power of this little game. It turns out I managed to nail the gameplay in a way that captivates users like the original. The game hit #1 2-3 days after release and stayed at the top 3 until today, distinguishing itself from other Flappy Bird clones. The retention rate one week after is 89% which is something I have never seen before! It managed to get more than 1600 5 star reviews during the first week. Even BlackBerry contacted me to tell me that this was something they have never seen before! Of course there were also the haters that shouted that this clone should die and its creator to burn in hell, but the vast majority of gamers realized that this game was not your average Flappy Bird clone, and was really adding to the genre.

No Apple doesn’t reject games with “Flappy” in their names

There I realized that this small project of mine had to come to other platforms, too. So I did a build for iOS last week and submitted it to Apple for review. During that time as you probably know the “Flappy rejection” thingy got out. And I thought that I was going to be rejected for having “flappy” in the tittle. It turns out Apple was not doing that. It was probably rejecting Flappy clones that were just bad games (auto generated, unresponsive, adding nothing to the game and in the end simply littering the store). I still disagree with that tactic, as the store should be able to filter “down” that kind of games by itself. But it’s better that we initially thought.

So there you go! You can now have the first Herbie staring game on your iPhone or iPad!

The future

While making this game I had the opportunity to test out some game mechanics that I found really enjoyable. I will be making these into mini games like this one, as next parts of the next sagas. But first I will be adding some more things into Trolls of the Forest (hint: a new playable character 😉 ). But I will leave that for another post… Happy flapping!